Wireless communication networks, such as those supporting mobile telephone and data services, naturally have operational limitations. These limitations may be physical limitations, such as equipment limitations, frequency allocations, power limits, base station placement, antenna configurations, noise, environmental factors, and so forth. Limitations may also be introduced by suboptimal system configurations. Two particular manifestations of wireless system limitations are call quality and coverage. Generally, poor call quality can be characterized by dropped calls, excessive power clipping, or a combination of both. Coverage problems may generally relate to failures to fully cover a service area such as low signal levels within a particular area.
Traditionally, coverage problems may be mitigated by adding more base station sites to provide additional coverage. Unfortunately, such approaches can have considerable lead-time delays as well as considerable costs in both capital expenditure and operating expenses. Furthermore, adding physical resources is generally a locally isolated solution with little flexibility for mitigating operational limitations across the network.
Traditionally, call quality problems may be approached by adjusting some radio resource parameters at the network or cluster level. Generally, these adjustments do not involve optimization at a cell or neighbor granularity due to computational complexity and a high volume of data to analyze.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.